Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

I hope to get a real entry done later this evening, but for now ...

Driving up Falls Road, I was behind an expensive-looking full-size sedan. Attached to the rear window was half of a golf ball, surrounded by a decal designed to look like cracks in the glass. Sure, it's basically dorky, but hey, it amused me.

I'm still not used to a camera that requires a batery to operate. On Christmas, the Pentax PZ-10 stopped doing the power-zoom thing (which I don't usually use anyhow) and then the autofocus stopped working. Last night the autofocus worked part of the time and I finally noticed the low-battery warning on the LCD. With most of the rest of my cameras, if I lose the battery, all it costs me is the meter (and autoexposure modes, if the camera has any). I think the Program Plus will shoot at 1/100, 1/1000, and Bulb without batteries, but I'd have to look that up. And I'm not sure whether the KX has a fully mechanical shutter. But everything else -- if it has any electronics in the first place! -- operates without batteries. The PZ-10 has no way to advance the film other than the built-in autowinder. No way to cock the shutter (which is probably all electronic anyhow). Once the battery goes flat, the camera stops. This makes sense, and the current battery has been in there for about a year I think, so it's not really a complaint about the camera; it's just an observation that I'm so unaccustomed to the situation that I find it startling to be reminded of it.

Being challenged on the way out of a store with a request -- no, a demand -- to see my receipt and look into my bag pisses me off. After being told, "I'm afraid I can't allow you to leave unless you let me," I decided that the folks who could see my receipt were the people at the customer service desk as I returned the merchandise and got my money back. But later I started wondering: what would he -- could he -- have done if I'd just said, "You bloody well can allow me to leave," and kept walking? Would he have physically restrained me, which I would have considered assault? Called the police to arrest me for taking something I had just paid for out of the store? (And yes, this was a store policy, with someone whose whole job is to hassle customers on their way out. I was not singled out.)

Similarly, in the past, I've told managers that the reason I'll never spend money in their stores again is because of policies that say "we accept personal checks ... oh, except for yours because you don't have your address preprinted".

Perhaps a Gollum-voice is not the most reassuring to use when telling a cat how preciousssss she is.

There were cardinals in my back yard today. I only saw one clearly, but there was a small flash of the same shade of red when the other one moved, so I'm assuming it was another cardinal, a younger male. If there were any females there, they didn't move enough to draw my eye (and, of course, would blend in much better than the males).

Perrine knows the word "bird".

While a bird she can't reach warrants a couple of frustrated cries or that cat-watching-birds chatter, for a housefly out of reach Perrine's complaint is a single short squeak.